Amy Lau handed away in January 2025 on the age of 56. The designer’s Manhattan condo, accomplished simply months earlier than her woefully untimely dying, completely captures her incisive eye and her steadfast perception within the ennobling energy of nice design. It’s the last grace be aware to a singular life spent within the pursuit of magnificence and pleasure.
Surveying Amy Lau’s stellar dwelling in New York’s historic Alwyn Court docket, one can’t assist however lament the lack of one of many design world’s most authentic voices. Amy was a font of optimism and surprise, a champion of artwork and design positioned within the service of a life well-lived. Her condo brilliantly synthesizes the various threads of her storied profession: her virtuosity in marshaling superb scale, proportion, and form; her fearless embrace of colour as a mode of emotional expression; her refusal to attract synthetic distinctions between tremendous artwork and tremendous design; and her drive to conjure inside worlds redolent of curiosity, connoisseurship, and pure delight.
Amy advised AD that dwelling in Alwyn Court docket had been a long-standing dream. “This constructing holds a particular place in my coronary heart. I’ve handed the landmark numerous instances over the course of my years in New York Metropolis, and I used to be at all times captivated by the intricate great thing about its ornate façade,” she stated. Constructed between 1907 to 1909, the 12-story tower by structure agency Harde and Brief is well recognizable for its elaborate terracotta ornament, which features a crush of cherubs, crests, salamanders, scrolls, and vines. A block from Central Park, the Plaza Lodge, and fifth Avenue’s luxurious retailers, Alwyn Court docket rapidly turned one of many metropolis’s most costly addresses after it opened to its first residents. However to Amy, it represented excess of a status or a swanky deal with: It was a possibility to create “a private surroundings that tells my very own story” inside an icon of New York’s design historical past, she stated.
By the point Amy acquired her roughly 950-square-foot, one-bedroom condo, its authentic inside detailing had lengthy been stripped away. However, characteristically, the place others noticed solely mute, clean area, Amy noticed potential. She quickly engaged Michael Schmitt Architect and set out on a intestine renovation impressed by the glories of the previous and the promise of a shiny new future.
